Cata: Druid talent tree suggestions

I started working on the 31 point talent tree feedback. I have 1 partial post up so far. You can find it on the Beta forums here. I suggest taking a look at that thread, since I’m not going to copy/paste it here.

Basically, that feedback thread contains suggestions for what the first 2 tiers of the moonkin & resto talent trees should look like. I also suggest moving Furor to the first tier of the feral tree, to give feral druids access to Furor at low levels, and giving bears an easier way to move up the feral tree. The suggested changes to moonkin & resto trees are to make them more attractive to the other talent specs, and to make up for moving Furor out of the resto tree. Just cleaning up the first 2 tiers of the talent trees will begin to make the talents better overall for the specs.

I’m pretty sure that we have a lot of work to do with the druid talent trees, and that they are basically bad because they’re not done yet. I’ll be working hard over the next couple days to try and write feedback posts for all the talent specs, but it’s sleepy time now. It will likely take multiple hours to do all the necessary in-game testing on the Beta server necessary to figure out how to fix the seriously broken new version of the druid talent trees. Yes, it’s broken. Yes, we can fix it.

10 comments on “Cata: Druid talent tree suggestions”

Blizz said that druids are one of the classes that they haven’t developed properly yet – so they’re not really broken, just kinda thrown together, I think, to get something up.

Throwing ideas out won’t hurt, of course, but I wouldn’t stress too much about them being broken, at such an early stage.

The Furor feedback is good, it really needs to be removed from the resto tree – now that you choose a spec and get locked out of the others. Being locked out of Furor is kinda crummy for lowbies (since they are the ones who need it the most).

I hope they give us an update soon on when they intend to do more work on our trees, so that we’ll have an idea of what we have to work with.

I’m not worried about it so much as it’s my (unofficial & unpaid) job to provide feedback on whatever version we get of the talent trees to help shape them into not sucking by the end. lol. Unfinished trees are much more fun to play with, because it’s this stage in testing where the devs really want to hear our opinions.

Natural Shapeshifter doesn’t seem that useful with Tree of Life being a cooldown as opposed to a regular form.

The restoration talent tree looks like less choice at this point rather than the meaningful choices that were mentioned in the earlier blue post you linked. I just ran through and did a build with 32 in restoration. All of the points I didn’t spend just weren’t useful in my opinion. It wasn’t a meaningful choice. I didn’t pick up Furor, Fury of Stormrage, or Natural Perfection because they don’t add to the specialization of a Restoration Druid which is healing. So, I wasn’t really making meaningful choices. Instead, I was simply making useful choices.

At this stage, both resto druids and bears can’t progress to Tier 2 without wasting points in pointless spots – Shapeshifter will save us a small amount every 5 minutes, and Furor we can’t even use.

For bears, if we took this tree to be correct, they *have* to take a kitty talent to progress. At this stage, it looks like all ferals will be kitty+bear at once, ie, you can take almost everything, rather than specialising (which I think is a bit sad – sure it’s versatile, but what happened to the fun of specialisation?)

As someone on the forums said – what we see now are the talents they have decided to keep – but they need to be rearranged (and possibly tweaked), because it’s a mess right now.

I smile when I see people having kittens over how broken the trees are (like not being able to get to tier 2), because any logical person can see it’s not going to stay that way.

I’d like to know what the story is with Swiftmend/Mangle/Starsurge – why are two of them still in the trees? And where is Moonkin – will it be trained? When?

Just wanted to say that you answered your first question in the final paragraph with your own statements: the trees were pushed together to get everything out in a timely manner, and are far, far from finished in most cases. If you look, most of the talents have the same per-rank values, which makes some of them really underpowered, and others just strange (Genesis, for example, and Starlight Wrath).

As for Moonkin, I hope it would be available as soon as a druid “specializes” in Balance (at level 10). The wording in the description makes it seem like they are considering giving it to a balance druid immediately. Otherwise, it could very ably fill the spot that Starsurge does now, and you would be getting Moonkin form ~30-35. On a related note, pushback protection for balance spells seems baked into the specialization now, rather than talented. That would be an awesome change imo, though whether that protection would (or even should) be baked into the Moonkin form would probably depend on whether the form available immediately or later on in the leveling process.

And, Lissanna….keep up the great work, the devs did a great thing letting you into the testing early!

I just wanted to clarify and say that I wasn’t having a go at you Liss, I guess I just didn’t want you to spend hours testing something that would probably change pretty drastically (much like many of us did extensive posts on the alpha talents, and now they’re ripped apart).

I am not sure we need more options in the resto tree. Clearly we’ll pass on Lunar Justice as a raider. But the spec I linked above is what I would run for max DPS.

My biggest problem is that there are no interesting choices. In fact, there are almost no choices at all. I’m sure the tree is interesting as a player levels, but once you get the level cap, there are almost no choices left. I am at work right now, so I can’t really fool around or think about this a ton. But when I get off work, I’m going home, sitting down, and taking a good look at what they left us and maybe why.

Interesting. With your changes, Balance has at least 31 in Balance, 3 in Furor (Int==SP, can’t pass up more Int).

Seven more points to spend. I could spend them all in Resto to get MSS, but really all that tier-1 Resto stuff is still pretty weak.

I could spend four of them in Feral, to get Feral Swiftness (certainly nice for BG and any solo play), and use the other three as floaters.

However the existing MMO trees let a balance druid consider putting points into Furor and Perseverence and Improved Rejuv, all at the same time. I don’t think IR is strong enough to be the right choice, but it is an interesting choice.